Laying the Groundwork for Your Big Data Strategy

Companies are swimming in big data. The problem is that they often don't know how to pragmatically use that data to be able to predict the future, execute important business processes, or simply gain new insights. The goal of your big data strategy and plan should be to find a pragmatic way to leverage data for more predictable business outcomes.

Begin your big data strategy by embarking on a discovery process. You need to get a handle on what data you already have, where it is, who owns and controls it, and how it is currently used. For example, what are the third-party data sources that your company relies on? This process can give you a lot of insights:

You can determine how many data sources you have and how much overlap exists.

You can identify gaps exist in knowledge about those data sources.

You might discover that you have lots of duplicate data in one area of the business and almost no data in another area.

You might ascertain that you are dependent on third-party data that isn't as accurate as it should be.

Spend the time you need to do this discovery process because it will be the foundation for your planning and execution of your big data strategy.